Facebook Wrestles With the Features It Used to Define Social Networking (Published 2021)

Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead.

A big 2018 algorithm change was designed to encourage positive interaction with friends and family. Company documents show how it had the opposite effect, rewarding outrage and sensationalism. CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes if it meant harming the business.

Facebook's Big Move Toward the AfterWeb

Blow up your browser! The Next Big Thing is the AfterWeb. Facebook made a monumental announcement Monday that seemed as though it was designed to...

Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how

"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."

The Internet Isn’t Facebook: How Openness Changes Everything

Openness makes the Internet harder to govern — but also makes it resilient, innovative, and difficult to capture. Let's look at how the openness of the Internet both defines it and ensures its success.

Once Again, Facebook Is Using Privacy As A Sword To Kill Independent

Facebook claims that their role as guardian of users’ privacy gives them the power to shut down apps that give users more control over their own social media experience. Facebook is wrong. The latest

Teen Life on Social Media in 2022: Connection, Creativity and Drama

Majorities of teens credit social media with strengthening their friendships and providing support while also noting the emotionally charged side of these platforms.

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed

The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve."

Collective Social | Track what you love. Share what matters.

Curate lists, track your progress, and share recommendations across books, movies, TV shows, and more — all on the open social web.

Twitterlike is a Bad Shape

Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.

Pluralistic: Social media without socializing (19 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social media

Social media became an important platform for interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, coinciding with the onset of social distancing. According to a study conducted by Facebook's analytics department, messaging rates rose by over 50% during this period. Individuals confined to their homes utilized social media not only to maintain social connections but also as a source of entertainment to alleviate boredom. Concerns arose regarding the overreliance on social media for primary social interactions, particularly given the constraints imposed by the pandemic.

FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop

Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.